Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The year 2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
Hannah Arendt's controversial critique of the trial of the Nazi war
criminal Adolf Eichmann, and her work remains unambiguously pertinent.
Indeed, not only do the ghosts of the past continue to haunt Eichmann in
Jerusalem; another ghost - a ghost from the future - is also detectable
among her words. As one reads her text, Eichmann's polar opposite,
Bradley Manning, arises from Arendt's pages like a photographic
negative. Presently on trial for charges that include "communicating
national defense information to an unauthorized source," and "aiding the
enemy," Manning succeeded in accomplishing what Eichmann was tried and
executed for failing to do; Manning refused to participate in the
commission of crimes against humanity.

The reader must refrain
from inferring that an equivalence is being drawn between the atrocities
committed by the Nazi regime and those committed by the US. However
shocking the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis may be, one must
recognize that those crimes are not at all inconsistent with the
genocidal aims that that regime repeatedly and explicitly espoused. To
be sure, the US - which is also guilty of launching a war of aggression -
never professed any genocidal intentions; However much it fell short,
and however disingenuous it may have been, the rhetoric invoked by the
US was that of the enlightenment ideal of human freedom. In this light,
it should not be too contentious to maintain that the US ought to be
held to a standard higher than that reserved for Nazis. No war crimes
are acceptable, and the systematic denial of procedural justice, as well
as outright torture, and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the US
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Yemen, Pakistan, and other places over
the past decade are beyond reasonable dispute. Acts such as those
recorded in the video Collateral Murder (titled and released to the
public via Wikileaks), for example, which depict US soldiers killing
innocent civilians in clear violation of International Law, not to
mention such war crimes as the unabating drone attacks on civilian
targets, are among those that Manning intended to stop. That Manning is
facing life in prison for his actions is nothing short of a perversion
of justice - as perverse as the fact that had Manning meticulously
followed the rules, like Eichmann had, Manning would have been more
likely to be awarded a medal than a court martial. It is this injustice -
the injustice that arises from the collective adherence to unjust laws,
acceding to the inertia of injustice - that Arendt referred to as the
banality of evil.

Arguably Arendt's most familiar argument - and
that which provides the subtitle for her piece on Eichmann - the
banality of evil arose from her observation that Eichmann, rather than
being some demonic, terrifying creature, one so instrumental in
perpetrating monumental acts of horror, was just, as she put it, a
"nobody." Describing Eichmann as a habitual "follower," in
distinguishing his character from that of the stereotypical evildoer,
Arendt wrote that Eichmann "not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the
law." This was, in fact, Eichmann's main defense - the same discredited
defense invoked by the Nazi war criminals in 1945 at Nuremberg. Among
Arendt's observations regarding Eichmann's "banal evil" was that, rather
than scheming and plotting and intending to commit evil, Eichmann
didn't really think at all. "His inability to speak" she writes, "was
closely connected with an inability to think." The proverbial cog in the
machine, a tool more than a human being, Eichmann did not resist the
inertial flow of the Nazi war effort. To the extent that this applies to
Eichmann, though, the opposite may be said of Manning. In spite of the
claims of the prosecution, Manning consistently demonstrated an ability
to act according to clearly articulated reasons. Rather than
thoughtlessly obeying unjust laws, as Eichmann did, as Manning put it in
his testimony before a military court earlier this year, "I believed
that if the general public, especially the American public, had access
to the information ... this could spark a domestic debate on the role of
the military and our foreign policy in general." Manning may have
violated unjust laws. However, as Martin Luther King Jr., citing
Augustine of Hippo, put it in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "an
unjust law is no law at all." To be sure, should a conflict arise
between justice and law, justice ought to prevail.

This is not
simply rhetoric. The Law itself recognizes that to the degree that it
furthers injustice, a law is invalid. The precedents established by the
Nuremberg Trials - now firmly entrenched in such pillars of
International Law as Article 85 and Article 17 of the Geneva Convention,
not to mention the US Army's very own Field Manual - include the very
principle that merely following orders does not exculpate someone from
responsibility for war crimes. As Nuremberg Principle VII states,
"Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a
crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI [which includes the
murder of civilians, something which Manning repeatedly witnessed and
attempted to obstruct] is a crime under international law." That is, in
addition to his conscientious resistance, Manning had a positive legal
duty to resist collaborating with war crimes. That the enemy was not at
all aided by Manning's disclosure (unlike Bob Woodward's repeated and
uncensured disclosures of sensitive national security information) and
that no harm came to anyone because of Manning's acts is, though
completely relevant, dismissed from consideration by the prosecution.

Of
course, like history, "justice" is often determined by those in power.
If Nazi-Germany had prevailed over the Allies in the second world war,
for example, Eichmann would have most likely lived out the rest of his
life in relative peace and obscurity. Likewise, had Bradley Manning
followed the rules, as Eichmann meticulously followed those of the Third
Reich, he would probably not be facing life in prison. In other words,
had he not resisted, Manning would be guilty in fact - and in his heart,
if not in a court of law - of some of the very crimes that Eichmann was
found guilty of committing - and this is just how the US would have
wanted it.

It is no hyperbole to remark that the precedent
established in Nuremberg in 1945 is one of the most important and
enduring lessons of the Holocaust. And though this lesson seems to have
been lost on Barack Obama, and on many others, this lesson was not lost
on Bradley Manning. Learning of the regular perpetration of war crimes,
and finding himself in a position that demanded that he either do his
job, like Eichmann, and become an accessory to these crimes, or resist,
Manning made the decision to break this causal chain of injustice, to
resist unjust laws and practices, and to act in accordance with justice.

While
some of his supporters proclaim their solidarity with Manning by
announcing that "we are all Bradley Manning," insofar as his supporters
are not in prison - and may be unwilling to go to prison for their
beliefs - it is not entirely clear what such a proclamation entails.
What is patently clear, however, is that, to the degree that we accede to
and conform to the dominating power of capital and the state (as opposed
to the liberating power of resistance), we are all, every one of us,
Adolf Eichmann.

Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and contributor to hygiecracy.blogspot.com He lives in Brooklyn and can be reached at elliot.sperber@gmail.com